Bureau of Lost Culture

Over the last century, the word Shaman has been embraced by artists, hippies, psychonauts and spiritual rebels.

In the 1960s and 70s, shamanism had become a kind of countercultural shorthand for altered states, secret, magical knowledge, and ways of seeing outside rationalism, capitalism, and institutional power.

Shamans appeared in underground books, on psychedelic record sleeves, in communes and consciousness-raising circles. Writers like Carlos Castaneda blurred the line between ethnography and spiritual fiction. Psychedelics were framed as modern shamanic initiation rites. 

But as shamanism was absorbed into Western counterculture, the messy realities of the original shamanic cultures - land, lineage, service to the community, and sometimes danger - were replaced with personal visions, journeys and individual transformation.

Our guest today is social anthropologist Max Carocci whose work looks at how this happened. His latest book, Shamans: The Visual Culture, is an incredible portrait of the original shamanic worlds with an eclectic array of the sacred objects, tools, clothing and images shamans have made, along with the way they been photographed, filmed, and mythologised. 

Max is especially interested in how these images have turned the shaman into a symbolic figure — part spiritual rebel, part cypher for Western longing — while the original shamans continue to live under pressure from colonialism, repression and environmental loss.

#counterculture, #shamanism, #shaman, #tuvan, #galba, #newage, #spiritualisn, #magic, #ancestor

This is the second part of a conversation with the poet, musician and thinker Penny Rimbaud, co-founder, with Steve Ignorant, of the anarcho-punk band and activist art collective Crass
 
Crass emerged as a band in 1977, but quickly became something more complex, rejecting rock stardom, record industry norms, releasing records on their own label and using their platform to challenge war, nationalism, consumerism, sexism, and state violence. 
 

In this second part of the interview, we about the events that led to Crass and hear more about Dial House, an old rambling farmhouse in rural Essex, a long-running experiment in collective life — part commune, part refuge, part creative hub. It was here, where he still lives, that Penny's music, philosophy, artwork, debate, and daily survival are entangled.

And we hear about the founding of the Stonehenge Free Festival and the death of Wally Hope, cultural terrorism, Penny's work since Crass, and his thoughts on art, spirituality and the self.

Music played: 
Futility and The Soldier’s Dream (The War Poems of Wilfred Owen)
So What (Crass)
The Song of Self (With Louise Elliot)
You Brave Od Land (With Youth)
 
For more on Penny and his work
 

#counterculture #crass #pennyrimbaud #anarchism #capitalism #dialhouse #artschool #wallyhope #stonehengefreefestival

The sea, its myths, and the supernatural is the theme of this special New Year edition of the Bureau when we leave behind our usual waters to set sail into the past of a very unusual counterculture.
 
For most of human history, the sea has been both a road and a riddle. It promises fortune and freedom — but it also swallows ships whole. And in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as Britain’s empire spread across the globe, the sea became seen, not just as a physical frontier, but as a psychic one  — a vast, perilous deep where faith, science, fear, and fantasy collided.

This is the story the British cultural historian Karl Bell tells in The Perilous Deep: A Supernatural History of the Atlantic, his epic study of sailors’ lore, ghost ships, sea monsters, superstitions, omens and uncanny maritime experiences.

We hear about 'the caul' - the protective embryo of an unborn baby said to keep sailors safe, the 'jonah', a scapegoat eyed suspiciously by those on board as responsible for the ship's misfortunes, H P Lovecraft, cross-dressing pirates and  more.

This is not a history of battles or trade routes, but of dreams, fantasies and terrors — of the sea as it existed in the minds of those who sailed upon it

The Perlious Deep: A Supernatural History of the Atlantic

In early 1990s South London — a time when rave culture was mutating and London’s squats were pulsing with creativity, Aphex Twin, Global Communication, Nightmares on Wax, Autechre,Andrea Parker, Scanner — could be found DJ-ing and performing in spaces where a strange new sound-world was blooming.

This is the story of Telepathic Fish, the ambient afterparty scene created by the Openmind Collective. Telepathic Fish parties and club rooms were DIY countercultural happenings with turntables, psychedelic installations, living-room lamps, photocopied zines and a lot of imagination, becoming a meeting place for bohos, ravers, multimedia explorers and a new wave of electronic musicians. 

Now, as a new vinyl compilation and a beautifully illustrated 20-page booklet, The Telepathic Fish has resurfaced to rave reviews, Kevin Foakes — DJ, designer, archivist and cultural custodian — returns to the Bureau to talk squat party ‘finstallations’, Aphex Twin, Mira Calix, illegal Roundhouse raves, ambient zines and what DIY culture can do when technology, community and youthful imagination collide.

The Telepathic Fish Compilation

For Kevin  / DJ Food

#ambientmusic #aphextwin #autechre #miracalix #orbital #theorb #counterculture #diyparties #diyculture #telepathicfish #djfood

There are figures in counterculture whose names appear only in the margins of the story — whose influence is eclipsed, overshadowed, even dismissed, by more mythologised personalities.

Alaura O’Dell — known to many under her earlier name, Paula P-Orridge - is a musician, artist, occult practitioner, and was a co-conspirator in the band Psychic TV

For a long time, Alaura was described almost exclusively in relation to her then-husband, the arch provocateur and musician Genesis P-Orridge but she joined us to talk about life before Genesis,  the formative years of Psychic TV: the chaos, the energy, the experiments with magick and media, the turbulent times of TOPY - Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth - the global network of seekers and outsiders, where she was not merely a participant but an organiser — the one who handled the workings,  the practical magic behind the grand metaphysical gestures. 

Alaura’s life didn’t end when she parted ways with the band, with Genesis, or with the Temple. In fact, in many ways, it began anew. We will be hearing more about that in the second part of our interview in a future episode.

For more on Alaura and connect with her here (as Mistress Mix) 

#psychictv #TheeTempleOvPsychickYouth #paulp-orridge #genesisp-orridge #throbbinggristle #satanist #satanicpanic  #counterculture #coseyfannitutti #occult